Linus Ullmark was given the opportunity to show he can be a starter in the postseason for the Boston Bruins, but following a second straight loss, it’s time to shake things up.
After facing 49 shots from the electrifying Carolina Hurricanes roster, Ullmark’s working numbers include a brutal .860 save percentage and 4.16 goals against average, allowing eight to squeak past him. Because of this, it’s time to give Jeremy Swayman the nod.
Swayman and Ullmark split the 82-game season evenly at 41 games apiece, with both of them matching his rotation partner’s output. At just 23-years old, Swayman’s already looking to be the next goaltender in the NHL to play at a high level at an extremely young age and he doesn’t shy away from pressure.
With Ullmark showing an inability to perform, Jeremy Swayman rightfully deserves to start between the pipes on Friday.
Headed back to Boston for Game 3, the Boston Bruins need to start goaltender Jeremy Swayman against the Carolina Hurricanes.
The goaltender situation aside, Boston’s head coach, Bruce Cassidy, will have his hands full getting this group prepared to take on a dominant Hurricanes team that finished second in the Eastern Conference with a 54-20-8 record, ending the season with a six-game win streak.
They allowed the fewest goals per game on the year, allowing just 2.44 while maintaining the top penalty killing unit in the NHL with an 88% success rate.
Losing two straight games in the postseason puts the coaching staff in a mental blender. In these situations, you look to your areas of strength and areas of weakness and how to counterattack the latter.
More often than not, it’s a team’s inability to find consistent scoring from their four lines of offense, thus it’s a matter of blending new lines together which is tough enough as is.
For other teams, it’s a matter of stopping the opposition from scoring. Therefore, you need to shuffle the defensive pairings and maybe switch goalies depending on the scenario.
For the Boston Bruins, it’s C.) All of the Above. They’re getting absolutely hammered, being outscored 2-10 through two. There are only four players on the team who don’t have a negative +/- rating and three of them average ≤ 13:15 of ice time.
The B’s power play is a mess and they can’t even score on the Canes’ third best goaltender after they’ve now lost Freddy Andersen and Antti Raanta due to injury.
Jeremy Swayman has been rocking the ball cap on the bench for long enough. He may be a rookie, but he certainly can’t put the Bruins in a worse spot than they are right now down 0-2 in the series against the Canes.
This Boston team needs to be a completely different group on Friday night if they want to continue their run in the 2022 Stanley Cup Playoffs.